The documentary never finds the appropriate rhythm to match the severity of its subject matter.
Comment
01/09/07
Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story (2007)
83
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:23
Fresh:19
Rotten:4
Average Rating:7.2/10
Synopsis: Produced by Jane Campion and directed by Christ Sheridan and Patty Kim, this documentary examines the life of Megumi Yokota, a 13-year-old girl living in 1977 Japan who is abducted by North Korean... [More]
Director: Chris Sheridan, Patty Kim
Reviews for Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
Top CriticThis topic deserved better than America's Most Wanted.
04/11/07
This is a fascinating, underreported piece of recent world history, but Patty Kim and Chris Sheridan's documentary Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story doesn't do it full justice.
01/12/07
A touching but slender piece on the number one news piece in Japan. But what is the rest of the story?
01/12/07
Abduction unfolds as a tightly plotted mystery, and it wouldn't be fair to reveal much more than that.
01/10/07
Top CriticThe events that unfold in the new documentary Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story could have been told as fiction, but they would have seemed too much -- too unbelievable, too merciless.
01/16/07
Details a Japanese cause célèbre with ramifications for Pacific Rim Asia and, today, for world politics at the highest levels.
01/06/07
This is one of the best docs in quite a while.
01/13/07
There's no denying the fascinating nature of the story, about a 13-year-old Japanese girl whose mysterious 1977 disappearance was ultimately credited to nothing less than a kidnapping by North Korean spies.
01/12/07
The temptation to juice up the squalid elements of this story would be hard to resist for most filmmakers. Yet, for the most part, [the directors] manage to balance the story's jolting, world-shaking elements with the more intimate details.
01/11/07
Top CriticCanadians Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim's spellbinding documentary focuses on the relentless search for the truth by Megumi's parents and families of other abductees.
01/12/07
Top CriticAbduction: The Megumi Yokota Story looks, sounds and fascinates like an exceptional episode of a true-crime TV series.
01/31/06
Top CriticAt heart, it remains a wrenching human-interest story about a group of family members who refuse to allow their loved ones to become casualties of international diplomacy by simply disappearing.
01/12/07
Abduction is a skillful interweaving of emotional, personal stories with the thicker strands of history, and a reminder that in reality such tales rarely have a tidy end.
02/02/07
The documentary Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story succeeds as a true crime story and is compassionate and engrossing throughout.
01/12/07
Abduction pushes its poignant buttons while casting Megumi's kidnapping as a heinous crime, yet to its credit, it consistently does so with a deftly understated, devastating touch.
01/04/07
Eschewing the geopolitical for the personal, Sheridan and Kim manage to tell a sweeping Cold War saga that is at its most undeniably powerful when it is focused tightly on the tracks of two parents' tears.
11/23/06
The story it tells is a shattering mystery of violation and loss, if only because by the end, certain answers only lead to more punishing questions.
01/10/07
Top Critic... as thickets of history and culture are (too) neatly avoided, the viewer is also left in the dark.
01/25/07
This superb, quite moving film combines interviews, news footage and some reality TV-like sequences and works on a number of levels.
01/26/07
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